Resurrects the concept of a universal background field as a potential explanation to the dark matter problem and some other unresolved issues in physics. The idea of a universal background field is a persistent intuition in physics but it is currently out of fashion. However, if dark matter cannot be found then modern physics cannot explain the gross motion of stars in spiral galaxies, except by an ad-hoc modification to the laws of physics. A novel explanation was presented in Essay 1.1 (Van de Vusse, 2024) but this re-opens the debates about the existence of a universal background. Accordingly the background field idea is examined further. A prototype was introduced in the previous essay. If the Q field hypothesis can evolve into a full theory it would explain the origins of mass and inertia and lead to some important new perspectives in fundamental physics.
Introduction
The Q field hypothesis arose from a potential explanation of the orbital speeds of stars in spiral galaxies. It leads to a consideration of the origins of mass and inertia more generally and provides an explanation for Mach’s Principle without involving action at a distance. To move from hypothesis to theory it needs to be consistent with all the relevant evidence from reliable experiments and natural phenomena in physics. Which is no small task. This essay makes a start by considering a role for of Q in classical and relativistic dynamics.
The recommended approach for investigating the Q hypothesis is the same as the approach used to investigate the possibility for a unified model of light, see (Van de Vusse, 2024). Start with a blank sheet and accumulate the evidence from experiments in a logical framework. Put aside prejudicial assumptions and misleading analogies and let Nature do the talking. If there is any merit in the Q hypothesis a viable model will eventually start to merge. This approach is called the ‘Q protocol’.
Q and Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was born in the year that Galileo Galilei died and became (arguably) the greatest physicist of all time. He made major contributions to the understanding of light, mechanics, gravity and the solar system and helped develop calculus. In his spare time he was the Master of the Mint and invented several methods for securing the reliability of sovereign coinage.
First Law of Motion
Newton’s first law of motion built on work from Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and can be expressed in various ways. Here are some examples:
- An object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it.
- A body stays at rest or in a state of uniform motion unless compelled by a net external force to change.
- An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line, unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
This law is known to any high school student of physics. It describes what happens in Nature very well and to a very high degree of accuracy. But why is it true? Newton did not ordain or proscribe the relationships. His genius was to identify what was going on and being able to describe it systematically in words and mathematical equations.
So why does a body at rest stay at rest? Would it stay at rest inside a space capsule floating listlessly in deep space? And what is so special about straight lines? What is a straight line anyway?
Newton assumed a ‘straight line’ needed no definition. In spacetime it does need definition. It is the path though the reference frame describing the shortest distance between two stationary points. It is the path taken by light in a vacuum.
‘Constant speed’ is more complicated than you might assume. Speed is the rate of change of position with time, and constant speed involves this quantity staying unchanged for a finite duration of time. If you can establish a system of measurement units then a unit of speed is a unit of length divided by a unit of time. If you want to measure a length of a moving object then you have to record the front and back of it at the same time. Which means you have to have well coordinated clocks at the location of the front recording and at the location of the back recording. This is not always easy.
Time is one of the trickiest concepts in physics. For example, it turns out that the presence of gravity slows down time itself.
But for Newton that was no problem. He just assumed that “absolute time” made sense and this is a valid approximation (to one part in a billion say) for all mechanics not involving objects moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
What is the connection between Newton’s First Law and Q? The staying at rest part is easy. A body at rest is actually a body at rest in the Q. This is absolute rest. If a body is at rest in laboratory then it is at rest relative to that laboratory and both laboratory and the body are moving in the Q together.
The profound implication of Newton’s first law for Q theory is that Q must offer no resistance at all to uniform rectilinear motion. Once a body is moving it can stay moving without further ado. It is moving relative to Q so either it is moving through the Q or the Q is moving through it. Given that the proportion of an atom’s volume taken up by its nucleus and electrons is very small, it seems sensible to suppose that Q moves through the atoms and between the atoms of any material object. Like a ghostly breeze.
It has to be asked … why must the motion stay straight? Consider an ice hockey puck sliding across perfect ice. Who says its path cannot curve one way or the other? It still has the same amount of kinetic energy. It is no good saying “It is ruled out by Newton’s First Law”. Newton was only describing and formalising what he observed. He did not ordain the behavior.
In Q theory this is a very important point. The zero resistance Q offers is only on offer for steady straight line movements. If a body wants to go faster then it is going to have to involve a force acting in the same direction as its motion. This force does work. It causes energy to be transferred to the body from somewhere else. It increases the momentum of the body. If the force stops the body can keep its higher speed, extra momentum and extra energy.
If the path of the body is going to curve it needs to involve a force acting from the side. The speed can stay the same, and so can the kinetic energy. All that changes is the direction of motion. The Q does not like this. As soon as the sideways force stops the Q forces the body to resume travelling in a straight line.
Curved and circular motion can occur in several ways. One requires external energy, the other doesn’t. An example requiring external energy is a steering thruster on the side of a space capsule. A small jet uses fuel and pushes the craft from the side, causing its path to become a curve. When the jet thrust stops the space capsule resumes traveling in a straight line, and at the same speed as before. Another example is a heavy ring mounted horizontally beneath weather balloon. (An arrangement sometime used to study cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere). An electric motor sets the ring spinning. The back reaction turns the balloon in the opposite rotation, thus conserving angular momentum. When the motor stops and the ring stops turning the balloon stops turning also. A certain amount of electrical energy has been used and this has presumably ended up as heat.
An example of rotation not requiring external energy is an ice skater gliding smoothly in a straight line past a smooth vertical pole sticking up through the ice. She reaches out horizontally with her left arm and engages the pole with her gloved hand. Immediately she feels strain in her left arm and she is swung around in an anti-clockwise circle. If she lets go she glides off in a straight line again, usually in a different direction, but still at the same speed. No energy has been transferred. There was plenty of force – she could feel it in her arm. But she did not move any closer to the pole because the centripetal force was balanced by a centrifugal force.
What is a centrifugal force? It is a dangerous concept invented by classical physicists to make their system of mechanics complete. The name does not help much. It is just Latin for “fleeing from the center”. It is also known as a “fictitious force”. And yet is not really fictitious because it is easily witnessed and experienced. For example, fairgrounds used to have a Centrifuge/Rotor in which people stood with their backs to the inside of a large cylinder. When this was spun around at a reasonable speed the people inside could feel themselves pressed to the wall. So much so that friction held them there when the floor dropped away. But it a fictitious force in the sense that it is not like a proper Newtonian force. It arises because matter wants to go in a straight line and something is preventing that happening – like the skater’s arm or the wall of the rotor. The barrier applies against the matter that it being forced to travel in a curve. The Q squashes it from the other direction. It acts on every single atom in the body of matter.
Another way to change both speed and direction is through collisions. This is just like a swap meeting. Energy and momentum is traded and everything is conserved.
Yet another way to change speed and direction is to involve gravity. See later on.
If we can understand why the Q field is so insistent on uniform rectilinear motion then we might better understand why it reacts against matter that is being forced into a motion that is not straight and/or constant.
Newton’s Second Law of Motion.
Newton’s second Law of Motion is that Force equals Mass times Acceleration. There is some overlap with the first law in that for a given piece of matter, if force equals zero then the acceleration must be zero, i.e. the matter stays at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion.
But note the use of the word mass. What is mass? Would a lump of matter have mass and inertia if it were the only thing in the Universe? Probably not. The question points to a fine distinction between matter and mass. Mass is a property of matter. When a force acts on a body of matter free to move, that body of matter accelerates. The constant of proportionality is the matter’s mass.
It makes no difference what sort of force is involved. It can even be gravity. A piece of matter only has one type of mass. In Newtonian mechanics:
- Mass is a measure of the amount of matter.
- Mass of a body is a measure of its inertia.
- Masses of bodies are sources of their gravitational attraction to each other.
- Mass of a composite body is equal to the sum of masses of the bodies that constitute it.
- Mass of an isolated body or isolated system of bodies is conserved, i.e. it does not change with time.
- Mass of a body does not change in the transition from one reference frame to another.
In Relativity there is only one ‘mass’. References to inertial mass, gravitational mass and relativistic mass are unnecessary, confused and confusing. See (Okun, 2006).
Inertia
If a body experiences the application of an external force it resists being moved. This resistance is called its inertia. If a body is moving in a constant straight line it wants to keep moving in a constant straight line. This is also called inertia. If it is a spinning disc it wants to keep spinning. This is called rotational inertia. If it is an orbiting satellite it wants to keep orbiting. But why is it so?
Ernst Mach (1838-1916) noted that the phenomenon of inertia has a very close alignment corresponding to what he called “the fixed stars”. He conjectured that the relationship was not a coincidence but was in fact causal. Einstein called this idea Mach’s Principle.
In Q theory the relationship occurs because the distant stars and galaxies are embedded in a universal field called Q. Local physical experiments are also embedded in the same Q. The correspondence occurs not because of any direct action at a distance between distant stars and galaxies and local physics, but because the distant galaxies and the local experiments are all embedded in the universal Q.
This explains the relationship noted by Mach, but in a new way.
Mass
Q gives matter not only its inertia, but also its mass. Mass may seem to be fundamentally the same as matter (to the point where the words are used interchangeably) but a deeper consideration shows that it a property that is only revealed through physical and gravitational interactions. Q theory conjectures that without Q bodies of matter would not have the properties called mass and inertia.
Is it possible to test this idea? Q is everywhere so the counterfactual is not easy. But there might be some ways to do it. Essay 1.2 in this series (Van de Vusse, 2024) explored the idea using some thought experiments. It is also open to speculation about whether exists within the nuclei of atoms, or inside neutron stars.
It is even vaguely possible that Q has something to do with the Casimir effect. The Casimir effect is a small attractive force that acts between two uncharged conducting plates placed in parallel very close together. It was predicted by Hendrik Casimir in 1948 and measured in 2001. For example, consider two mirrors facing each other very closely in a vacuum. Something pushes them together. One suggestion (partly due to Neils Bohr) involves a quantum zero-point energy fluctuation exerting pressure outside the mirrors but constrained from doing so between the mirrors. However a simpler explanation is that the atoms in the opposing plates become little dipoles that start to attract each other across the gap).
Einstein – Relativistic Physics
Experimenters in the 19th century measured the two-way (out and back) average speed of light in a variety of ways and keep on coming up with the same answer … 299.792458 million metres/second. It didn’t make any difference which way the apparatus was oriented or whether there was relative movement between the source and detector. George Fitzgerald (1851-1901), Henri Poincaré (1852-1912) and Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928) tried to explain this and started to realise that classical concepts of length and time were inadequate.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) simply assumed/postulated that the speed of light measured in a non-inertial reference frame was a universal constant. Paying particular attention to the definitions and descriptions used in dynamics, especially time, he obtained the equations of Special Relativity. Einstein’s work rests on three postulates:
- The laws of classical physics and the outcome of experiments do not depend on the reference frame that the observer chooses to describe them in.
- “Classical relativity”, i.e. if body A is moving at velocity V with respect to another body B, then body B is moving at velocity (–V) with respect to body A.
- The speed of light is always the same in any inertial reference frame, irrespective of how that frame is moving or oriented.
The first postulate (due to Galileo) is the idea that physical outcomes should not depend on the choice of reference frame in which they happen to be described. However, this is not as straightforward as it sounds. See for example the Special Relativity “ladder paradox”. In one reference frame a moving ladder fits inside the barn, in another reference frame it doesn’t. But it is fair to postulate that if there is a discrete event in one frame (e.g. a string breaks) then it also occurs in any other reference frame.
The second postulate firms up the argument that outcome are relative to the reference frame used to describe events and behaviors them in quantitative terms.
The third postulate is ‘heroic’. Every part of it is heroic. To begin with, Einstein did not give examples of inertial reference frames. Nor did he admit that perfect inertial frames are almost non-existent. Nearly everything in the Universe is spinning, rotating or orbiting, or is affected by gravity.
As for the speed of light being a constant, the evidence for this it is surprisingly weak. Einstein said he based it on some experiments by Fizeau and on the difficulty various experimenters were having in detecting movement through the hypothetical aether.
Einstein did not reference the null experiment of Michelson and Morley in his 1905 writings, but he must have known about it. But is typical of the experiments Einstein was familiar with, so let us use it as an example.
It may be unkind, but it is fair to point out that the Michelson-Morley experiment does not take place in an inertial reference frame. It takes place in the Earth’s gravity, on an planet that is rotating on its axis while it orbits the Sun, which is itself in a galactic gravity field and is orbiting the galactic center at a speed that modern physics cannot yet explain.
Furthermore, the interpretation of the results, and the results of all experiments using interferometers, is based on the wave model of light. Einstein’s own explanation of the photo-electric effect had already shown this model is incomplete or deficient.
Furthermore, all the experiments occurred in an infinitesimal moment in the history of the Universe in one infinitesimal sample of space. It is a huge jump to infer that this proves that the speed of light is the same throughout the Universe and has always had the same value and always will.
Lastly, the third postulate fudges what is meant by the speed of light. There could be a difference between the speed as measured in two way path (out and back) as compared to a one way path. Since speed is distance divided by time, and both distance and time are no longer simple concepts, we have to be careful about hidden assumptions.
The equations of Special Relativity follow logically from the three postulates, provided that the coordinates are well defined. There are good explanations on all this on-line, usually involving a moving tramcar and a laser emitting pules of light onto mirrors and back again.
Since velocity (if constant) equals distance traveled divided by the time interval involved, fixing the speed of light in two frames moving at velocity V with respect to each other has dramatic consequences for the observed distances/lengths and observed time intervals. In short, each observer concludes that lengths contract and time itself slows down in moving from a reference frame at rest to a reference frame in motion.
So, for example, a meter ruler, which we know and expect to be a meter long when it at rest in our reference frame, turns out to measure 0.866 meters long when it is moving through our laboratory at half the speed of light.
Einstein’s papers went further. By considering conservation of energy and momentum he obtained the most famous equation in history:
E2 = p2 c2 + (mc2)2
where E is total energy, p is momentum, m is mass of the object at rest in the reference frame, and c is the speed of light (in any inertial reference frame). If there is no momentum involved this simplifies to E = mc2 . If there is no rest mass (e.g. a photon) it becomes E = pc.
The beauty and power of this equation is that it shows that matter can be turned into energy.
What is the evidence from experiment? To take the last result first the answer is yes – the conversion from mass to energy has been demonstrated conclusively and at scales from the subatomic (e.g. in particle accelerators) to the macroscopic (e.g. nuclear explosions).
Time dilation has also been demonstrated convincingly. It is not an illusion. Moving atoms decay more slowly, radiations at a characteristic frequency become lower in frequency, atomic clocks run slower and so on. Furthermore, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity led to the realisation that time is also slowed down by gravity.
It is interesting to note that Lorentzian length contraction has never been measured directly by experiments. To do it properly one requires both ends to be recorded simultaneously and at relativistic speeds this is just too difficult. The closest thing to a direct experiment involves colliding particles at very high speeds and inferring length contraction must be present from the scattering effects. Contraction also leads to an increase of the intensity of a particle’s electric field perpendicular to the direction of motion, and the predicted effects have been observed.
It may help to realise that some lengths and some time duration measurements are more “proper” than others. To measure length properly you need to be able to record the location of both ends simultaneously and this is best achieved if the object (or gap between two objects) is at rest in your reference frame. To measure time intervals properly it is best to have the same clock attend both events.
Einstein’s relativity was adopted quickly by some and regarded as an oddity by many others. It was not mentioned specifically in the citation to Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize.
Momentum
There is a popular high school physics demonstration in which a small vane inside an evacuated glass container is set spinning by shining a strong light on it. The same idea surfaces in the concept of ‘solar sails’ and ‘interstellar winds’. It demonstrates that photons convey momentum. Astute students will ask “How can photons have an impact and convey momentum when they have no mass?” It is a good question.
The usual answer is to reference Einstein’s equation E2 = p2 c2 + (mc2)2 with mass m equal to zero, which simplifies it to E = pc. Hence momentum p = E/c where E is the energy of the photons and c is the speed of light.
This describes some fundamental physics in mathematical terms but probably baffles the students even more.
Here is a more radical explanation. It is offered as an example of the type of lateral thinking that might be important to understanding Q theory.
Matter at rest in the Q stays at rest. Energy has to be transferred to the matter to cause it to switch to uniform rectilinear motion. Once the matter is in motion it stays in motion unless it can deliver some of its (kinetic) energy to something else. So maybe the property we think of as a body’s momentum is not really a property of the mass of the body, but is instead a property of the energy that has been given to the body. Same equations – just a different perspective. But possibly more insightful. For a start it answers the student’s question. If momentum is a property of energy in motion rather than mass in motion then of course photons convey momentum because they are a very good example of energy in motion.
Matter, Mass and Energy
When an electron and a positron interact they annihilate each other and the result is two energetic gamma rays. This is a simple and dramatic example of the relationship between matter and energy. The gamma rays are pure energy. The matter has been turned into pure energy.
Note the use of the word matter rather than mass. Q theory suggests mass is a property of matter arising from the interaction with the Q. When the electron positron annihilation occurs matter is turned into pure energy. Its mass disappears. Gamma rays have no mass. But if and when a gamma ray is absorbed it gives up its energy to the absorber in a way that creates extra momentum in the absorber. This momentum is entirely related to the energy of the gamma ray.
Any kinetic energy in the electron positron pair ended up in the intrinsic energy of the gamma rays through a Doppler redshift. A gamma ray transfers its energy to the absorber in various ways. But some of the energy transferred ends up creating momentum. This is equivalent to the momentum of the original electron-positron pair and so momentum is conserved.
If matter can be turned into pure energy can pure energy be turned into matter? The answer is yes. It is not easy but here is an example demonstrated at the Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in 2021. Two gold atoms stripped of all their electrons move in opposite directions at a crossing speed of 99.995% of the speed of light. As the relativistic ions pass one another very closely (but without colliding) the electromagnetic clouds surrounding each gold ion interact with each other producing two gamma ray photons. The gamma ray photons immediately interact with each other to create an electron (e-) and positron (e+) matter-antimatter pair. See (Adam, 2021)
The production of the gamma rays is itself very interesting. The gold ions carry a powerful positive charge. They are moving very quickly so that creates a magnetic field around them as they go. This and rapid accelerations creates the right conditions for producing gamma rays.
Taken to an extreme, the Q hypothesis suggests that all the building blocks of matter can be created out of pure Q. However, that dream is beyond the current scope of these essays.
General Relativity and Background Fields
Mathematician Hermann Minkowski was surprised when Special Relativity was published because he had been working on the same subject himself. Nevertheless he was gracious enough to share his elegant four dimensional spacetime formalism with Einstein. Minkowski’s influence encouraged Einstein’s interest in the four dimensional differential geometry of Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) that led to the mathematical foundations of General Relativity.
For many decades Relativity provided enormous scope for abstract mathematics, but slim picking for actual experiments. Somewhere along the line the notion arose that the curved spacetime formalism that was found useful for describing the relationships between energy and mass and movement had actually shown that that gravity (the greatest force in the Universe) is just an illusion.
Einstein himself did not endorse that belief. He seems to have shied away from it, expressing the view that the issue was not what was real or not, but what description was useful.
Textbooks can be unclear about this. Consider the heavyweight (2.6kg) textbook “Gravitation” by Charles Misner, Kip Thorn and John Wheeler (MTW). MTW elevate the four dimensional coordinate system in General Relativity into a “thing” in its own right.
On Page 5 they say Space acts on matter, telling it how to move. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to curve ….. Thus matter here influences matter there. That is Einstein’s explanation for “gravitation”.
On page 1054 MTW say Special relativity, general relativity, and all other metric theories of gravity assume the existence of a metric field and predict that that field determines the rates of ticking of atomic clocks and the lengths of laboratory rods …
And while it seems that MTW regard their metric field as not being ‘physical’, MTW still find it necessary to link it to the physical Universe in a special way. On page 19 they define a local inertial frame as one in which test particles free to move remain at rest or in a state of constant straight line motion. In Figure 1.7 they say a reference frame is not an inertial reference frame if it (1) rotates, (2) accelerates, or (3) does any combination of the two. But on Page 1117, while discussing a Post-Newtonian coordinate grid for the Solar System, MTW link it to “an inertial frame far from the solar system, which in turn one expects to be fixed relative to the “distant stars”. And on page 1118 they talk about a gyroscope with spin S “relative to the co-moving orthogonal frame that is rotationally tied to the distant stars“. In this chapter MTW are describing the “dragging of inertial frames by the angular momentum of the Earth.” On page 1119 they say “The gyroscope …. and the local inertial frames rotate relative to distant galaxies …. because the Earth’s rotation ‘drags’ the local inertial reference frames along with it“.
The point about these quotes is that that MTW are still using “distant stars” as a reference frame. However they do not clarify whether they mean stars in the Milky Way or in the Universe more generally. And they do not mention the galactic rotation curve problem that was discovered a few years before their influential book was first published.
Q theory has a different perspective. It regards the four dimensions of curved spacetime as a very useful system of coordinates for the mathematics of General Relativity. It believes that General Relativity provides an excellent description of the Q field and the Q field interacts with matter to produce the phenomena of gravitation. One example of Q in action is that the partial dragging of the Q within spiral galaxies, thus explaining the observed rates of stellar orbits without the need to invent dark matter.
It is important not to fall in love with the mathematics so much that the physics gets left behind. One example of this is the habit of putting the speed of light equal to 1 in all the equations. This tidies up the equations but obscures the physics. Variations in the speed of light are one of the most interesting aspects of the whole topic.
In Chapters 39 and 40 of their book Gravitation MTW set up a contest between Einstein’s version of General Relativity and a bevy of other metric theories of gravity. In short, because General Relativity does such a good job of explaining the classic tests of General Relativity, most of the other contenders are squeezed out. MTW also point to a range of experiments that demonstrate that local physics is extremely indifferent to the way the experiments are pointing, or to the movement of the Earth. This is claimed to eliminate the surviving contenders.
This raises a very valid point. For the Q hypothesis to survive and thrive it will have to be compatible with a lot of relevant experiments. Not necessarily with the popular interpretation of the evidence, but with the evidence itself. Sometimes the current interpretation of the evidence is itself open to improvement
Lorentzian Relativity
While Einstein was using his postulates to leapfrog ahead to some very interesting equations, Lorentz was still trying to reconcile classical physics, including Maxwell’s electromagnetism field equations, to the evidence from recent experiments on light.
Michelson-Morley’s experiment to identify aether drift effects in the speed of light in one arm compared to the other arm failed to find any such effects. This cast doubts on the existence of the aether at all. However, Lorentz surmised that what the experiment had detected was length contraction in the dimension that lined up with the motion, and Poincaré realised that time had to be moving slower as well. So the aether had not been disproved, it was just that it could not be detected in experiments like that of Michelson and Morley.
By 1905 Poincaré had corrected Lorentz’s treatment of electromagnetism and had begun to include gravity as well. He called it “The New Mechanics”. Aspects of this work were taken up in the further development of Special Relativity. Guided by Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909) Einstein continued to extend the mathematical formalism of Special Relativity. By 1911 Lorentz left them to it.
The essential point of difference between Lorentz’s concept of relativity and Einstein’s is that Lorentz’s approach still includes the notion of a universal background aether. It is just that relativistic effects make it undetectable. Einstein’s postulate about the speed of light being a constant in all inertial reference frames gets the same results as Lorentz had already deduced, but from a different direction.
By 1915 the situation had changed. Whereas Special Relativity had been built on the postulate that the speed of light was always and everywhere constant, General Relativity came to the conclusion that gravity not only slowed the passage of time, it also slowed down the speed of light.
Einstein repeated the approach that had led him to Special Relativity. He based General Relativity upon a heroic postulate – the Principle of Equivalence – that on a local scale the effects of gravity were the same as the effects of uniform linear acceleration. This led to a powerful model for dynamics and gravity that became a mathematician’s paradise.
However, the “Principle of Equivalence” is not a fundamental truth about nature. In fact it is not even strictly true. Good physicists can always tell if they are being linearly accelerated or if they are being pulled by gravity. Consider a space capsule containing some physicists who feel themselves pulled/pressed to the floor with acceleration = B metres/sec2. Is it gravity or not? Most gravity fields are radial so the physicists could hang two thin pipes from the ceiling and determine if they converged slightly. Or they could weigh something at floor level and again at ceiling level. If it weighs slightly less at ceiling level it is gravity. Or they could use a pendulum and check the period of swing at floor and ceiling level. If the period it is the slightest bit different it is gravity. Or they could check a laser beam for gravitational redshift. Etcetera. If still uncertain they could look through a peephole in the floor. If there is evidence of energy being expended and rocket gases streaming out behind it is acceleration. If there is just a huge lump of matter then it is gravity. Likewise a good physicist can tell if there is no gravity or the capsule is in free fall because the cable holding it up has broken. If unsure of the answer the physicist can just wait a short while and nature will reveal it.
For this reason Q theory does not necessarily agree with the various cosmological models that adopt the Principle of Equivalence and stretch its application far beyond local physics.
In Q theory all the equations of General Relativity still hold, but the interpretation is different. The Q field is actually real, not just a mathematical model. Q determines the rates of ticking of atomic clocks and the lengths of laboratory rods. Large lumps of nearby matter distort the Q and this affects how particles move, light travels, neutrinos travel and the four forces of nature work and interact. There is no action at a distance. Everything operates through Q. There is no tension between Q theory and the mainstream interpretation of General Relativity on a scale smaller than the Solar System. Q is literally the fabric of spacetime.
Q is a universal field and in deep space it correlates quite well with the overall distribution of galaxies. It is not however completely static. Within spiral galaxies the local Q is dragged around by the billions of stars and immense amounts of conventional dark matter. This gives a Mixed Rotational Reference Frame effect (MiRRFe) that explains the orbital speeds of stars in such galaxies, including our Sun. See Essay 1.1 of (van de Vusse, 2024).
Q is responsible for giving matter its mass and also all its inertial properties. This applies at a cosmological scale right down to a quantum scale. Which explains Mach’s Principle. The “fixed” stars are fixed in the Q and so are Newton’s bucket and the Foucault pendulum and any other dynamical experiment. If something is rotating it is rotating relative to Q.
Summary
The Q field hypothesis is that a universal quantum energy field gives matter its mass and inertia and that matter affects the Q field in the way that General Relativity describes for the spacetime metric. The Q protocol involves accumulating experimental evidence into a logical framework before starting to speculate exactly what Q is. A start has been made on setting up the Q framework. An early result is an explanation for Mach’s Principle. Another is an explanation of the orbital speeds of stars in spiral galaxies without requiring dark matter. The next essay will discuss whether Q has anything in common with the currently dormant idea of a luminiferous aether.
References
Van de Vusse, Sjoerd B.A., 2024, Some ideas and experiments for issues affecting modern physics, https://hereticalphysics.com.au
Misner, Charles W; Thorne, Kip S; Wheeler, John Archibald, 1972, Gravitation, W H Freeman and Company ISBN 0-7167-03344-0 (paperback)
Okun, Lev, B (2006) The Concept of Mass in the Einstein Year, arXiv:hep-ph/0602037, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.hep-ph/0602037
Adam, J. et al (2021) Measurement of e+e– Momentum and Angular Distributions from Linearly Polarized Photon Collisions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 052302, July 2021
Author contact: SBAvan@utas.edu.au
Author’s location: Hobart, Australia
